love leaves a memory no one can steal
by i love alex
Summary: He's written her a million love letters.


A/N: This is a little different. And a little darker but not in the supernatural sense. A warning of sexual assault connotations.

* * *

><p>He's written her a million love letters. They are sloppy and too much with the way he loves her; he still gets self-conscious about it, even though she already knows just how much. Like it's silly to love her this way, to want to tell her that he does in a million ways. The letters usually stay in his mind but he tells her sometimes, writing them across the small of her back when she's half asleep and it's too early but he's awake and watching her.<p>

Writing his love letters, a million of them, to her.

It's silly, he sometimes thinks, to love anyone this way.

"I'm crazy about you."

They're caught in the rain one night when her car won't start. He gets out to see if he can fix whatever might be wrong while she gets out to check for umbrellas in the boot. They both come up empty handed but it doesn't seem to really matter when he has her pressed against her car door, giggling cold air into his cheeks. He wipes her face the best he can, tucking her hair behind her ear even though the rain covers them, so heavily, in sheets.

"I'm crazy about you." He tells her because she was so beautiful, with her pink cheeks, even pinker lips and a laugh that could get him to smile no matter what. Elena stops fiddling with his jacket, her eyes filling with tears.

"I'm crazy about you too." She whispers gently like it's a secret they both didn't know even though their hearts these days are so ridiculously entwined that one could pretty much beat for the other even though his doesn't beat at all.

Like in the movies, the rain gets heavier and heavier as they kiss. And he's thinking, only briefly, that this thing with her, the way he feels when she's right beside him or on the other side of the room, isn't silly at all.

* * *

><p>He leaves her a letter the night they break up. It's just a piece of paper, folded in half, lying on her pillow. She cried the entire drive home and as she walked to the front door and climbed up the stairs but for some reason, she doesn't cry at all as she reads what he wrote her. Because even though reading that he can't do this anymore should be something that should make her weep more, it's really the only thing that gets her to stop.<p>

* * *

><p>The night he gets out of the tomb, they have sex in her bed with the lights off and all of their clothes still on.<p>

When her eyes flutter open in the morning, he's still fast asleep. One arm covering her body and the other tucked beneath his chin. Her fingers start at his now naked back.

He doesn't know it, but she's written him love letters too.

* * *

><p>She goes missing one day in the spring and is gone for almost two weeks. He hasn't slept at all, lies awake at night in her room and the letters he writes as he's desperately clinging to the fact that she was coming back, he promises himself he will show her because life was too short not to tell someone how much you loved them. No matter how much you told them to begin with.<p>

A closeness grows between him and Damon because they're both scared shitless. Nothing about her disappearance was related to their supernatural world and nothing about it was fixable, could be solved through any skills they possessed. She was walking home one day and a man had simply grabbed her. That's all they knew. All they had to go off.

But after 13 days, Sheriff Forbes finds a photo ID of the man they think did it. He's been jailed twice for the charges of sexual assault, specifically rape and even though Damon deliberately keeps this from Stefan, he finds out anyway and breaks his arm by punching his fist through a wall.

He'll kill the man and anyone he's ever met. He'll torture him, tear his head off, make him suffer. He's going to do it all and this blind rage blinds the fact that his baby, _his_ baby is missing and is probably becoming the man's third victim. Stefan vomits violently that night in her bathroom. Vomits until he realizes that he's crying, heaving and gasping for air. For her. He can't leave this house, Bonnie forcing a spell upon it that didn't allow him to leave and he's not offended but grateful that his brother would think that he would do anything to save her. Including slaughtering anyone that got in his way. _I will find her_, he promises and Stefan, crawling into her bed, clutching her letters, her pillow, what he can of her, believes him.

Damon finds her in less than 24 hours after having a photo ID. Stefan never asks his brother what he did, how he killed the man and Damon never offers. Stefan knowing without needing to ask that Damon made him suffer just as much as he would have.

He's the last to know that she's found. Bonnie comes to see him the next morning and it takes him a lot longer than it should, a couple seconds, to realize what it meant by her lifting the spell.

When all Bonnie does is nod, as he wordlessly asks her, standing at the bottom of the stairs as she stood on the porch, the front door agape, Stefan can barely get a hold of the banister before he's sinking against the steps.

"She wants you." Bonnie tells him and that gets him up, gets him to pull himself together because he cannot be fucking weak for her, weak for them. He cannot.

She's quiet until she sees him. And then she starts to sob, loudly, covering her mouth with her hands but he strides through the room and holds her, whispering that it was alright, that she was alright.

The people that had been in the room, Caroline and her mother, Damon, seem to silently leave and it's only when they're alone that he become self conscious, scared and wary of touching her.

But he can't keep from touching her; needs to keep touching her because he's never going to leave her, he's never going to let her be hurt ever again and it's when he's struggling to keep it together, holding only her hand that she gives him a note he hadn't realized she'd been holding all along.

_You are me and I am you and nothing will ever change that._

That's all. That's all she wrote, her writing still as neat as ever and even though he's the one who's crying, falling forward and burying himself in her stomach as she hushed and soothed him, she's finding that she's breaking right in two.

* * *

><p>He does stop touching her. And it's driving her completely and utterly crazy. Four months have passed since the incident and she's gone through counseling and has done all the necessary steps and requirements a victim of rape needs to do even though she hates having to call it 'being a victim' in the first place. She does it all though, believes she's past it all, all but the fact that he hasn't touched her, won't so much as brush past her. When all she really wanted was to go back to her life, get things back to normal. Her normal, vampire filled life.<p>

Though her vampire is driving her crazy.

"Stefan." She says. He's standing facing her windowpane, the curtains pulled back to let the last light in of the day.

She wonders if he realizes that he'll tense, just slightly, whenever he hears her voice these days.

It's been _four_ months.

"I want to read you something."

She has nothing to read him but thinks this might just work. Sure enough he turns to look. There's some paper on her bedside table, some she knows he uses to write with whenever he was at her place without his journal (he's been at her place a lot these days).

He looks suddenly frightened.

"Dear Elena," She begins then stops just after her name, not expecting this to be another letter. She looks over at him, frowning and when he looks away and turns his back, something about his face makes her heart sink and want to stop reading even though she knows she'll continue reading until the end.

"Dear Elena, my Elena. It has been fives days exactly. It has been fives days exactly, to the hour, to the second, since you have been gone. Almost an entire week. I think I'm losing my mind; it's slipping through cracks in the pavement and bends in the roads that lead anywhere but to you. It's disappearing with you; I'm disappearing with you. I want to marry you, Elena. I want to marry you today and tomorrow, yesterday and the day before that. Can we do that? Can we get married? Because I love you, I'm in love with you, I've been in love with you for days, for months, for an entire year and I'll love you for days and months and years after. Come home. Come back to me. Stefan."

When she looks up at him this time, he's staring at her with tears in his eyes and on his cheeks. He looks so tired, more tired than she's ever noticed and she suddenly realizes that it's because all those nights when she wakes up, frightened and terrified, it's him who wakes up along with her. Because she can no longer sleep alone, hasn't been able to for these past four months. But he stays awake with her, even though they're silent in the darkness. Though they won't touch and she'll pretend that everything is okay and nothing has changed when it has and she has, whether she likes it or not.

"Yes." Her voice quivers and she thinks they are as pathetic and silly and in love as each other.

It takes him a couple seconds but his face shadows and his eyes round and he looks more fearful than he did before.

"What?" His voice is barely above a whisper; he's so still, it's disarming.

"I want you to touch me first."

He takes a step back before she's even finished the sentence.

"No."

Elena only smiles, calm and patient. Steady with him, knowing him. Loving him.

"I'm not completely okay, I know that but I am better. I am doing better but you won't touch me, Stefan. We sleep in the same bed and it's like we're on separate parts of the world. I can't get past this if you can't, neither of us ever will."

"Elena…"He warns but it sounds more like a plea and her skin is already burning, even from the thought of his fingers on her but she _needs_ to do this, knows they need to do this.

She's wearing just a bed shirt and some shorts and she slips the shirt off over her head, leaving her in a tank. Stefan is frozen, torn between grabbing for the shirt, forcing her to put it back on or from grabbing her a blanket.

Elena lies back along her bed, closing her eyes. He thinks she doesn't look as brave as she's probably trying to be.

"It doesn't work this way." He says because it doesn't and it wasn't going to work for them, for her. Not this way. Not with her blind and not secure.

Elena, without a word, pushes herself up off the bed, storms around him and slams the door to the bathroom.

When he slips in, a few minutes later, she's on the ground of the shower, naked with the water running.

"Stop treating me like I was broken." She says through her tears and Stefan sits outside the shower door, comes against it so that they were back to back through only glass.

"Are you ashamed of me?" She says and her voice is softer, thick with tears and he opens the shower door, sits in there with her until he's soon soaking wet and takes her face. He cups her cheeks, rubbing his thumb over them again and again, not enough to be enough.

"Dearest Elena, you are me and I'm you and nothing could ever change that."

She kisses him and it takes him only a few seconds to be able to kiss her back.

These love letters they've written. They've signed and stamped but some of them, the private, and secret ones. Those remain in them, on them. For days, months and years to come.

* * *

><p>AN: Oh it's so different but it was so interesting and enjoyable (on some level what with the content) to write.


End file.
